Metareference in the Nineteenth-Century Pictorial Press and Beyond

Metareference is a medial and semiotic phenomenon that occurs whenever a media product directs attention to its own medial and representational qualities. Usually associated with postmodern art and culture, metareference operates in the margins of media history. This chapter therefore makes a point of examining its presence in the nineteenth-century pictorial press, represented by the Swedish journal Ny Illustrerad Tidning (1865–1900). Here, metareference appears in the form of pictorialized letters, pictures within pictures, and textual elements that are neither inscriptions nor part of the depiction, but are nonetheless integral to pictorial representation. In this capacity, the Swedish journal is like its European and North American counterparts, which were all part of a media culture where the illustrated press boomed. The chapter aims to study how metareference in this context builds on what is introduced as the picture’s inherent, both formal and historical, intermediality. Proceeding from the closely connected fields of intermedial studies, word and image studies, and media history, the chapter demonstrates how metareference is dependent on a web of intermedial relations that tie together media products, mediating practices, and media concepts in the broader nineteenth-century media culture and how metareferential explicitness and implicitness results from such meaning-making, historical as well as formal, intermedial relations. Ultimately, and beyond the media culture of the nineteenth century, the chapter’s metareferential examples are highlighted as tools to reexamine past and present historiographically established discourses on media, mediation, and representation.